I Have the Right To

by Chessy Prout

  I’d thought a lot about Tabitha over the last few months. She messaged me when the Today show interview aired and apologized for not being more supportive.

  Tabitha: The case was already triggering a lot for me, and I was scared that if I reached out to you, I would do more harm than good . . . I was also worried I wouldn’t be able to make the memories stop and that my parents’ lack of support would become even more obvious, and therefore damaging.

  Tabitha was the last person who should be apologizing. I felt terrible that her parents hadn’t been there for her when she needed them, something I’d unfortunately heard from many other survivors. I’d hate to think about where I’d be, or whether I’d even still be here, if I didn’t have my family by my side every step of the way. I was an anomaly and I wanted that to change.

  I had encouraged Tabitha to join #IHaveTheRightTo, but I never imagined she’d want to get others at St. Paul’s involved too. I texted her back on Valentine’s Day.

  Me: I think that is an incredible idea, to do an I have the right to photo project at school. I really hope this is raising awareness there and making the boys think twice about taking advantage of the removed environment and young girls.

  Tabitha: I’m so glad you’re into it; I just wasn’t sure and wanted to ask

  That text was a cherry on top of a great day. I had recently begun dating Parker, a guy I had known since middle school. He was kind, authentic, and cute. It took me a while to be comfortable with the relationship, but Parker understood. He was patient with me and let me cry on his chest whenever I was overwhelmed.

  Our relationship was relatively new so I wasn’t sure how, or if, we would celebrate Valentine’s Day. In Japan, girls gave boys chocolates and not the other way around. I avoided Parker that morning and talked to a younger classmate about protest opportunities in Naples. Eventually, Parker tracked me down and handed me a small, decorative bag filled with champagne-flavored gummy bears, a pink stuffed pig, and a bar of chocolate. It was definitely the work of his mother, but it was very sweet and I was blushing all morning.

  Making myself emotionally vulnerable was really hard, and it was just as tough dealing with the pressures of physical intimacy. But I drew my lines and Parker knew to respect them. I introduced him to Mom, Dad, and Christianna. And I met his family. They seemed so perfect and had that southern hospitality. Mine, not so much. We didn’t do small talk anymore, and Mom and Dad were often holed up in the office. Sometimes they’d summon me to catch up on pressing legal matters or to do an interview while Parker was left alone on the couch in the living room. But he acted like he didn’t mind and was happy to go with the flow. It was exactly what I needed.

  A hearing on Owen’s ridiculous request to get a new trial was scheduled for the end of February. It was perfectly timed to spoil my winter break. There was no way in hell I was going—Dad would attend—but I knew I’d have to hear about it somehow.

  I was having trouble digesting this latest legal maneuver. Owen was blaming the guilty verdict on the ineffectiveness of his very famous, very expensive lawyer, J. W. Carney Jr. I’d say it was buyer’s remorse, but Owen didn’t even foot the bill! And Carney was such a monster to me. What more did Owen want Carney to do—go up to the witness stand and murder me?

  As the hearing was about to start on February 21, 2017, I saw a text from my old roommate.

  Tabitha: Hey so I mentioned the I have the right to campaign in young women’s club, and people were really not into it

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it stung nonetheless. The curt tone of her message made me feel as if I had done something wrong. I immediately went on the defensive, rattled that I thought people at St. Paul’s could back the initiative. They were still a disappointment.

  Me: Wow, thank you for trying with that though, that was really kind/awesome/brave of you to bring it up there. That really hurts my heart, because I had this sort of vision that doing my project there would show the school that the kids really care about making the culture healthier and safer, and that it’s not about politics or personal injuries but about basic human decency. It really hurts me that the kids there couldn’t see the bigger picture, a picture where we can work together and help take away any animosity that some kids there have fostered and others (like you) have tried so hard to take away. Shit. Thank you so much though tabitha. I hope you didn’t catch any shit because of that.

  Tabitha: I completely agree. And dont worry, nobody gave me shit at all.

  I hoped this wouldn’t dissuade Tabitha from fighting for this cause after she left St. Paul’s. We needed as many young warriors as we could get out there. And Tabitha was a pretty badass one.

  Dad settled into his usual spot in Courtroom 1 on the far corner of the bench behind the prosecutor’s table. There was no jury, just Judge Smukler to listen to this nonsense.

  On the first day of the hearing, Owen’s new lawyer took aim at Carney for failing to introduce at trial my full mental health records, emails from older guys at the school, and photos of me and Christianna during graduation weekend. Apparently, stitched together with a thread called lies, these documents would have revealed that I was a suicidal, slutty alcoholic who had “secret snuggles” with senior boys and possibly had more than one sexual encounter on the night of my assault. Oh, and the kicker was that I clearly could not have been assaulted because I was doing splits the next day on a trampoline with my little sister.

  Dad, in tears, texted Mom.

  Dad: This is worse than the f$&&&&& trial. Cant breathe or move . . .

  Mom was watching a live video stream from the computer in our home office. Suddenly she flew through my bedroom door, almost out of breath.

  “I can’t believe they’re saying this, but you need to know this stuff is floating out there,” she said hotly. “I don’t want you to learn about this somewhere else!”

  I was thrown off by Mom’s outburst. I thought it was pathetic and revolting that Owen could exploit the legal system to abuse me once again. I couldn’t deal, so I ran to the beach, where I watched waves pound the sand over and over.

  After court that day, Dad drove a few miles down the road to St. Paul’s and tried to remember why he loved that school so much. He passed by his old dorm and looked at photos of his 1982 baseball and basketball teams hanging in the athletic center. He checked out the volleyball courts, where Lucy and I used to play, and waved to our former coach. He ran into Tabitha and chatted with her for a few minutes.

  Dad crunched dove-white snow under his dress shoes as he walked over to the Upper. Inside, he ran his fingers along the wood panel where his name was carved along with the other graduates from the class of 1982. In the long arched hallway before the senior couches, he found the name of Robert Barrie Slaymaker, Class of ‘47, and noticed the wood worn down around “Slaymaker,” where Owen and the other boys had rubbed it.

  Dad had one more stop for the day: a small white shed near the woods known as the Mars Hotel. He had learned about this place from police: it was where Owen and the other guys used to take girls to score. Dad saw keys with a yellow tag in the door and ducked inside. Skis and ski poles were neatly stacked along the unfinished wood walls; gone were the couch and condom wrappers. When he left, he took the keys and half-buried them in the snow near the door so the yellow tag was still sticking out. It was his one tiny act of rebellion.

  As Dad drove away, he got a call from our lawyer, Steve. St. Paul’s attorney, Mike Delaney, had sent Steve an email and left an urgent voicemail in the last hour.

  “Mike knows you’re on campus and he’s threatening to forcibly remove you,” Steve said.

  “Tell him I’m in front of the student center and he can come and find me and take me away,” Dad hollered, finally losing his cool. “I’m the one who’s a St. Paul’s graduate. He can’t take that away from me.”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger, and keep the faith, Alex,” Steve said before hanging up.

  I was fuming when Dad told m
e about the school’s latest threats. I knew St. Paul’s was being nasty in our civil suit, demanding to see my journal and trying to depose my friends. They didn’t seem remotely interested in resolving the case or in addressing the problems they knew too well. They just wanted to make this as painful as possible for me.

  But why was Dad the pariah? How could any young person feel comfortable reporting a crime knowing this is how the school treats victims, including their family members and alumni? It’s this kind of approach that makes the rape culture and victim shaming at St. Paul’s so potent. The school would rather attack me and my family than look inward at their shortcomings, at the lives derailed on their watch.

  On the third and final day of Owen’s hearing, Carney took the stand. He was a witness for the prosecution, for Catherine. This was beyond bizarre.

  The live video stream was spotty, so Dad texted updates to Mom. Carney admitted that he deliberately crafted a trial strategy to keep out damaging information about Owen. This included police interviews with my friends Catie, Ivy, and Faith, who I spoke to immediately after my assault. Carney called these three girls the “most harmful witnesses” because they would have undermined Owen’s defense that I fabricated the rape from the beginning.

  If Catie had recounted to the jury what I said happened in the mechanical room, “it would be toxic to the defense,” Carney conceded.

  Catherine showed Carney a photo from the night of my assault when I was demonstrating on Ivy how Owen pinned my arms up against the wall so I couldn’t move—something jurors never got to see.

  “And do you recall the state’s attempt to try to have that admitted at trial?”

  “Yes, I do,” Carney said.

  Catherine then made Carney describe other police reports that never saw the light of day.

  “There were a number of references throughout the discovery of other women whom Owen had dated in which he had acted in ways, according to the women, that were very aggressive, that were forceful, that led to Owen having a very bad reputation at the St. Paul’s campus among women as someone who would be so aggressive that he would actually go so far as to inflict injury during a sexual act with a woman, such as biting a lip or biting a nipple that would cause injury that was apparent the next day.”

  These were girls, teenage girls, not women. Whitney, the freshman with braces, told Detective Curtin that Owen brought her to the Mars Hotel, where he was “very aggressive.”

  “Two things then happened that made her feel like she was being violated,” Carney said, summarizing the police report. “Number one, Owen sucked on her lip and gave her a blister, which hurt. Number two, Owen sucked on her breasts, leaving bruises.”

  Whitney had shown Detective Curtin pictures she took of her swollen lip. She said she hadn’t spoken up at the time and told Owen he was hurting her because she felt inferior. I’d never had the strength before to read the police report, but hearing about it now made my heart ache.

  Whitney told police that she heard about another girl who felt “very violated by him” and told other people that Owen was “too aggressive” and “close to hurting her.”

  Then Carney read a police interview with Briana, the senior in my dorm who confided that Owen had done the same thing to her. Catherine asked whether Carney’s trial strategy was to prevent Briana’s statement from coming out too.

  “Absolutely correct,” Carney said.

  I was so confused as to why Catherine could introduce this evidence now but it had been kept from the jury during trial. Was it too damning? I didn’t understand our criminal justice system sometimes. All I knew was that it was stacked against survivors every step of the way.

  In the afternoon, Carney described a mock trial exercise in which he brought a criminal defense attorney in to cross-examine Owen to prepare him for taking the stand.

  “He destroyed him,” Carney said. “At one point, Owen was agreeing that ‘I guess it’s true I am a pedophile who was trolling to have sex with underage girls.’ ”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that all of this information was coming out now, after the trial, after the jurors had gone home, after anyone seemed to care.

  The statements these girls made to police didn’t surprise me in the least. What did shock me was one paragraph contained in Detective Curtin’s report: the vice rector, Mrs. Hebra, knew Owen had a problem months before my attack.

  Mrs. Hebra acknowledged to Detective Curtin that Briana had told her that Owen was “really rough with girls,” “likes to pull girls’ hair,” and was a “sex addict.”

  When Mom shared this with me, my mouth dried up. My skin turned white. My legs froze. I thought I might faint. Mrs. Hebra was an adviser in my dorm, the school’s vice rector, one of the most powerful women on campus. She’d invited me to her house to write my victim impact statement, sent me a note after I left St. Paul’s apologizing for the school’s lack of support, dropped groceries at our house during the trial. Was that because she cared? Or because she felt guilty that this all could have been prevented in the first place?

  A week after the hearing, I had a panic attack in math class, my first period of the day. My mind went blank, I couldn’t focus, and my legs started to shake. I left during a break and hyperventilated in my car before driving home. Mom cooked a feast to try and comfort me: spaghetti and meat sauce, chicken and broccoli, bean sprout salad, mixed greens, and a fresh strawberry pie. I sampled a bit of everything. Later that day, I received a letter from a fellow survivor, a perfect stranger, offering me strength and support.

  It was times like these when I was reminded of my faith: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done.”

  I was still struggling in my relationship with God. I felt alienated from our church since learning that leaders there had pushed out my friend who helped run the Cat Island programs because she was a lesbian. Using religion as a weapon to deny people rights or withhold God’s love sickened me.

  But it was my faith that helped me arrive at a place of semi-forgiveness, first for myself and then for Owen. I’ve read the divorce court records where Owen’s mother accused his father of sexually abusing Owen once when he was a child, though state authorities apparently couldn’t substantiate the claim. In any event, in a college essay Owen gave to police, he elaborated more on his view of his childhood:

  I left for boarding school because I wanted to become a better man than my father . . . My father became a lustful man and an angry father, and a slew of vices earned him virtual expulsion from the world of academia; he hasn’t held a job in years. At age fifteen, in a moment of adolescent self-reflection, I began to fear my father’s character latent within me. He was not, and is not, the man I wanted to become, so I left. In my first few months away from home, I found myself still grappling with the vices that I, frustratingly, felt as if I had inherited from my father. However, presented with the opportunity for self-examination and graced with the chance of self-reinvention away from home, I was determined.

  Owen may have been determined, but he failed miserably. And he was failed miserably by the community that surrounded him—from his father to his friends to the leaders at St. Paul’s who did nothing to stop these ritualized games of sexual conquest.

  Owen has yet to express an ounce of remorse to me. But hating him takes up too much of my body, too much of my heart. Instead I rely on Grandma Prout’s wisdom: “Pity him.”

  I still hated what he did to me and despised his lack of a conscience. But it was not my job to change him; he had to do that by himself. I had to think about my own future. I was looking forward to Barnard, to advocacy work, to trusting other boys again. Having a new relationship was helping me heal and realize that I really do have the right to respect, patience, and love.

  Dad wanted to do an advocacy event with Representative Kuster in St. Paul’s backyard in Concord. I hadn’t been there since the trial and had serious reservations. But I knew that Concord
was a place that was never going away and it wasn’t healthy for me to harbor fear and anxiety over it. This was my chance to create new positive associations, to reclaim a city. Returning with Congresswoman Kuster by my side seemed like the perfect way to go back and own it.

  It didn’t mean I wasn’t scared. I asked Delaney, my best bodyguard, if she could come with me. But she was busy taking a well-deserved vacation. Angela promised to attend and bring baby Aryana.

  The event was held in mid-April at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, just a few minutes away from St. Paul’s, something I didn’t know beforehand.

  We flew into Boston and hopped into a rental car. On the ride up to New Hampshire, I did a phone interview with a writer from Seventeen magazine who was working on a piece about teen activism. I was feeling okay until we turned off the highway and onto Main Street in Concord. Buckets of tears streamed down my cheeks as we drove through downtown and passed all my favorite spots—Siam Orchid, the Works, Live Juice—and then the place I never wanted to see again, the courthouse.

  I was stressed and sobbing when we stopped outside the law school. Amanda Grady Sexton, who worked for the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and helped organize the event, quickly shuttled us into a small room where we could have some privacy.

  I was wailing, Mom was weeping, and by now, Amanda was crying too.

  Mom held me tight while Dad yelled at himself for driving past painful sights, for pushing me too hard.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Mom soothed, rubbing my back.

  “We can send the reporters home. We can send everyone home. We can shut this all down,” Amanda said. “None of this has to happen. You don’t have to do this.”